Friday, July 08, 2011
As a musician, he famously countered his lack of virtuoso skill (reflected in his failed attempt to have his passport list “non-musician” as his occupation) with cutting-edge electronics on stage and further effects in recording studios to sculpt sound. The freewheeling idea man and art school veteran began deconstructing common rules of pop music; this was not so rare in the late ‘60s/ early ‘70s, but Eno pioneered the concept of the studio as an “instrument” of sound creation that became much more useful than merely capturing the sounds of instruments, rather colored, shifted, distorted, and reconfigured it in entirely unnatural ways.
Most musicians would be glad to assist in the invention of one genre of music. Brian Eno has been at the forefront of at least three. He coined the term “ambient music” for the meditative, unobtrusive electronic instrumentals he recorded in the 1970s, which in turn lead to the modernist sounds of David Bowie’s Berlin albums (produced by Eno) new age music of the ‘80s. With an eye (and ear) on New York City’s art scene of the late ‘70s, he recorded the earliest efforts of the city’s “No Wave” musicians. Artists involved in visual art, performance art, and film were mixing pop, disco, new wave, funk, jazz, and punk with off-center cerebral, abstract critiques of modern life and Manhattan’s urban decay. Shortly after, Eno and David Byrne took the dance-oriented pop of the band Talking Heads into realms of African and European pop styles and rhythms rarely heard in stateside disco or rock. Emphasis was on avoiding the staleness of relying on past formulas and pondering the next creative shift.
Solely discussing music doesn’t do justice to Eno’s “renaissance man” resumé. Eno has lectured on and published thoughtful analyses of art, societal systems, entertainment history, computer technology, and architecture. The “swollen appendices” of the book’s title don’t refer to an illness, but rather the inclusion of an appendix section of ruminations on these topics. Aside from his diary, sources include emails to colleagues, speeches at banquets and colleges, magazine articles, even short fiction speculating on possible futures. A practicing visual artist himself, Eno installs and curates multi-media exhibits around Europe. Much of the book’s emotional depth comes from his work as co-founder of War Child, an organization providing community centers of psychological therapy and creative activities to children of all ethnicities in war-torn Croatia and Bosnia. In 1995, Eno’s involvement lead to the “Passengers” album and concerts, with talents as varied as U2 and Luciano Pavarotti generating aid for Balkan conflict victims. When he visited Split and East Mostar at the time, fresh signs of tragedy and loss were common. “Bosnia – collapsed buildings, little houses that once held life and families casually blown over by tanks. ‘Let’s destroy their homes.’ No crueler statement… East Mostar buildings so ruthlessly, hatefully hacked by shells that you couldn’t put down a single hand without touching one.”
Travel is a constant for Eno, whether meeting David Bowie in New York, U2 in Ireland, recording the band James in London, lecturing at universities, curating in museums, or vacationing in Italy and Egypt. Concise yet detailed travelogues from Cairo to The Upper Nile evoke dust and fog, scorching sands and evening breezes, savory odors and bustling colors in the markets, and the meditative presence of history radiating from the monuments of ancient civilizations. Describing The Valley Of Kings temples: “Outside the [Tuthmosis IV] tomb, among those wild, barren desert hills, I found some fossils. It didn’t seem surprising… then to the most beautiful of all, Ramses II. The combination of almost frenetic intricacy and complete calm… night fell and I lay out on the top deck, watching stars, smelling burnt sugar cane and quassia, listening to amplified muezzins wailing from the [Nile] banks.”
Eno’s musical and technological pursuits overlap the greatest in computer systems of self-generating visual art and/ or music. One of his goals is moving from known/ predictable recreation of composed patterns to pattern-manipulative and variability-inclusive technology forms that won’t repeat themselves (not for thousands of years, anyway). Eno explains: “The computer [manipulates] small sets of rules… i.e. the instructions responsible for generating material, rather than huge blocks of data, such as premade bits of video. The computer is… good at playing with numbers, rather than… being a surrogate video player. The amounts of data that the computer needs to handle are vanishingly much smaller, and therefore more of the computer can be engaged in doing something interesting; growing the whole thing anew before your eyes… this gets around the biggest limitation of ROMs – that quite soon you’ve been through the archive and seen everything you are going to see… my proposed CD-ROM offers an always-new experience, since it does not rely on chunks of performed material… but is always generating new material – limitlessly… any key you touch, any mouse movement you make, will cause a reaction in the program… you don’t need to spell out these connections, but allow them to be discovered.” Another way he describes interactive arts and entertainment is “locked” versus “unlocked.” “More and more, I want experiences which oscillated between… the elements of an experience being closely tied together or, at the other end of the axis, independently drifting… the rigidly structure and the completely amorphous. I don’t make a pitch for either, but for the ability to use the whole palette.”
Other discussions include the borders where art and objects end and frames or packaging begin, the notion of social station (“knowing one’s place”), and ideals of government. A question he asks in multiple ways is, “Where is the frame (package)? Where does it start? Where does it end?” Aside from the framing of visual art, and the packaging of musical recordings, Eno wonders if Post-Its around computer monitors are part of the “desktop.” Observing the bitter media criticism of a painting exhibition by David Bowie, he counter-critiques: “…artists are supposed to sit in their garrets until a professional galleryist turns up and says, ‘You are a swan,’ whereupon the artist looks in the mirror with wide eyes and says, “Yes, I am a swan.’ Why shouldn’t people hire galleries? Why shouldn’t people publish their own books?... The worst thing is this pathetic English reaction, ‘He has no right to do that.’ It just puts the argument in the wrong place.” Eno sees critical cries of dilettantism as supporting the status quo and tradition while disempowering artists and audiences. In one passage on governmental structures, he observes: “Camille Paglia says that government and socialization are what civilizes us, not what robs us of pure instinct (as Rousseau supposed), and I find myself wanting government to take more seriously its ‘civilizing’ function – to establish and defend a set of international behavior standards… Libertarianism rests on the assumption that things left to themselves will pretty much sort themselves out. This may be true in some cosmic, entropic sense (how could you know?) but there’s no reason to assume that we or our interests would survive this sorting out.”
The richness of food for thought of A Year With Swollen Appendices has kept me browsing concepts and re-reading passages for years. Almost every page provides a provocation or perspective for viewing our world differently.
Eno, Brian, A Year With Swollen Appendices, London UK, Faber and Faber, 1996, ISBN 0571179959
Halfway through Invisible Cities, the novel by Italo Calvino, readers could be forgiven for wondering if they are reading a novel. The novel begins with the structure of a narrative fable concerning the meeting of Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn in the Yuan Dynasty of 13th Century Asia. Slowly, beyond normal artistic license of dialogue and presumed character motivation of historical fiction, the fabric of Polo and Kahn’s world unravels in front of us… or maybe its threads weave and expand themselves before our eyes? The tapestry enters off into, or drops suddenly out of, a fourth dimension, alternate universe, or fever-dream. As the deeply-visceral elements of this other world shift below our feet, reality and meaning are enigmatic, but reward one’s senses of philosophy, mystery, and the surreal when fully considered.
The tale can be summarized as a set of meetings between Marco Polo and Kublai Kahn in which the merchant tells the emperor of the cities he’s seen. Moving through the chapters, it becomes clear that the cities contain the fanciful, then the completely impossible. Through their small universes of the mundane and magical, landscapes of riches and ruins, beauty and horror, the landscapes, people, pets, spirits, and mythological creatures, we see the properties of all existent cities reflected by these non-cities. Anachronisms abound: dirigibles, cable cars, radio signals, pavement, and junkyards. Kahn begins to question Polo’s role as a faithful narrator, attempting to describe the doubly-fictional (in our world and theirs) cities in minute detail, with the men ultimately questioning their place in the universe. Perhaps Kahn is out charging in battle and Polo boards another distant port’s dock, and they occupy faraway lands rather than discuss them in palatial garden salon or gilded lakeside yacht; they can’t say for certain.
The theme, summarized in a single word, is “paradox.” Many typical philosophical ones are considered: life and death, work and leisure, dream life and consciousness. Calvino also confronts more evasive ones through the nine chapters. Kahn’s empire conquers kings that once rules as he did; an empire expands to the point where it becomes ungovernable and prime for conquering. Foreign kings become subjects, in turn becoming provincial leaders under their overlords, ultimately holding the empire’s fate in their collective hands. The city of Leonia embodies the paradoxes of wealth and progress; its citizens renew all of their belongings daily, to display the novelty and richness of the city. A surrounding pile of discarded luxuries from each new morning hems the city in with still-new, unwanted garbage piles. The citizens of Thekla constantly mask their city in construction platforms and equipment, perpetually renovating to prevent decay, but merely give the burg disorderly unattractiveness while prolonging the inevitable. If Thekla escapes decay, it’s only to impractically take a skeletal form of impermanent structure. Conversely, Zora is a city that crumbles from lack of renovation due to the citizens desire to refuse all forms of change.
The philosophy of Invisible Cities should be represented by at least one more word, though – “perception.” Differing views of reality are well-considered: “…the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities… the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there… the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed… at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his… the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” We define our present with hindsight, when it becomes the past, based on further comparisons and discoveries from our future experiences. In Leandra, the resident gods of the city, the Penates, who look after and migrate with people, and the Lares, who associate themselves with fixed buildings and rooms, argue over which of them contains the soul of the city. There’s an obviously unknowable answer for their argument of nature (in this case, the style of physical environment) and nurture (how the people use and relate to their city), a mystery to what degree the city forms the citizens and vice versa, through the centuries.
Still more themes are uncovered. The real-life need of Marco Polo for a translator to speak to Kahn leads Calvino to consider limitations of language in particular and of our communication of the complex and intangible (our invisible, mental worlds) to each other. Do Polo’s efforts at sign language and metaphorical gesture sometimes explain his meanings to the emperor better than formal language, with its cultural assumptions and incommunicable translation lapses? Beyond this, can there be obvious gaps in language to convey personal concepts and visions? “…to be sure, words were more useful than objects and gestures in listing the most important things of every province and city… and yet when Polo began to talk… words failed him, and little by little, he went back to relying on gestures, grimaces, glances… as an understanding grew between them, their hands began to assume fixed attitudes, each of which corresponded to a shift of mood…” In another vision, Polo sees the mind’s workings as parting clouds that part to permit a distant scene to focus, or as thick smog that obscures and turns to grime. In this metaphor, the past can aid growth via framing it, or deterring it, as when memory leads to presumptive expectations, neuroses, and reliance on obsolete views. The fable of Trude tells of the biggest enemy to the soul of cities in our times, the homogenous suburb; Polo clearly represents Calvino himself in his travels, worrying about how similar all of his destinations appear. “The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.” Procopia is a metaphorical city of overpopulation; the smiling faces observed, each new year, from a hotel window soon cover the entire landscape, literally, human piled atop human. Raissa’s dual and concurrent landscapes of misery and cheer exemplify how the most intangible perception-shapers of all, emotions, can hinder, obscure, and control our views.
In every mini-story comprising the novel, Calvino provides much understanding of the human condition and psyche. Our past gives meaning and shape to our future, unseen when that past was a former present. Many things are not simply what they seem; whether the sum of varied parts, or pieces of a whole, things have properties which are either ignored or spotlighted to suit our purposes. Language can fail to fully communicate the feelings and intricacies of the mind/ soul. Our mind’s recall can give an erroneous view of the past, create expectations incongruent to our present, and shape our future for better or worse. What we call “reality” is based on many presumptions, personal experiences, and limits of knowledge that shape it. We, like our cities, are in an eternal state of change that defies maps and static truths.
Calvino, Italo, Invisible Cities, New York USA, Harvest/ Harcourt, 1972, ISBN 0156453800
